If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

What’s the alternative to this state of affairs? Bennett suggests that his typical man see his sixteen free hours as a “day within a day,” explaining, “during those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income.” Accordingly, the typical man should instead use this time as an aristocrat would: to perform rigorous self-improvement — a task that, according to Bennett, involves, primarily, reading great literature and poetry.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln

He needed sun and soil and wind to remain a man.

The answer, he told me, was to be found in reading. Can it be that simple? It was books, he said, that made him a better man.

Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.

Open Walden to any page and you will find a man saying in a plain and orderly way what is on his mind: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength

I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.

You taught me how a man becomes eternal;

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Yes, I decided, a man can truly change. The events of the past year have taught me much about myself, and a few universal truths. I learned, for instance, that while wounds can be inflicted easily upon those we love, it's often much more difficult to heal them. Yet the process of healing those wounds provided the richest experience of my life, leading me to believe that while I've often overestimated what I could accomplish in a day, I had underestimated what I could do in a year. But most of all, I learned that it's possible for two people to fall in love all over again, even when there's been a lifetime of disappointment between them.

The inside story on a man was that if he wanted to be successful, he must become a rugged individualist, but then should make some adjustments.